Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Here is more from Olivier Clement, in his Book, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology. This is from pages 35-36.

Then the question arises: Why has God created us tragically free, tragically responsible – so heavy a burden that we constantly lay it down at the feet of idols and inquisitors? To which the great Christian Tradition replies unanimously: God created us free because he summons us to deification – to a divine-human condition in which our transformed humanity will find its fulfillment. This call demands a free response. Union that resulted from mere magnetic force would be automatic, instinctive, unworthy of a personal existence which, even in its wish for union, requires complete responsibility.

There does exist, it is true, an impersonal love which is the working of desire. Some contemplatives have stressed the spontaneous return or nature towards its origin. Denys the Areopagite, for example, saw the world as a kind of immense liturgy, a sacred dance revolving around the divine Centre, held in its attractive force. However, Denys was accepted into the Tradition only when corrected by Maximus the Confessor who, in his own writings and experience, emphasized the terrible freedom of man.

That is why Adam had to undergo the test of freedom, to grow in maturity towards a conscious love. That is why sacrificial Love could not be revealed until Abraham’s knife had glinted in the eyes of Isaac …That is why the chosen people were a stiff-necked people, who got their name – Israel – after wrestling in the dark with the unnamed Stranger. That is why, finally, when God took on himself the destiny of Isaac and of Job, he came in secret, so that only by the free love of humankind could he be recognized in a crucified slave, defiled with blood and spittle.

. . .

We can really love God only because we can refuse him. The book in the Bible which most clearly expresses this truth is possibly the Song of Songs, where the one painstakingly seeks the other. God seeks us more than we seek God.

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comments:

Anonymous
said...

"That is why the chosen people were a stiff-necked people, who got their name – Israel – after wrestling in the dark with the unnamed Stranger"...who dislocated his hip with a single touch and how could he have overcome Him, if he could no longer stand up without limping and had to cling on while the Stranger gradually wrestled him to a standstill and he stopped running from himself and then a single word spoken re-integtated him with his Destiny...

Genesis 32:25 When the man saw that He could not defeat him, He touched Jacob's hip as they wrestled and dislocated his hip socket....

P.S.) Not that I suppose it makes any substantive difference, but the Septuagint says the stranger put Jacob's thigh to sleep, numbed it. Touched a certain nerve. Neurapraxia is what the condition is called today.